L'Ancien Regime

The Chimera...I wonder what it would be like to make love to such a creature??? I think I'm falling in love with her..

That's at the end when I'm texturing it. By sketch I mean just roughing things out to see how the proportions will work and how I'll lay out the masses of the object.

No, just quick voxel sketches...voxels cry out for a monster computer with massive amounts of RAM and a Soviet Army of CPU cores but if you can get them 3d Coat rules..

Rapid test sketch to see how everything will fit together. 2d paint brush is awesome for this. And this makes me think that in huge scenes when you need to have a lot of props in your scene, it would be a very effective way to work to have the most distant objects in the scene to be nothing more than quick sketches like this that would give a mere impression without requiring a lot of toilsome detailing....

Yay! I finally figured out how to get the Merge tool to work with high rest Voxel image..

Am I ever glad I bought 3d coat...

That was fast...damn fast.

The main mesh is in Maya polygons smoothed and I'll be taking parts out for reworking in 3d Coat with the merge tool, reworking them as voxels then retopoing them and bringing them back into Maya to stick onto the main frame.

That's beautiful...just in time to hopefully employ it in my own new project. Thanks a lot of taking the trouble to make us a new tutorial, another valuable acquisition in my comprehensive hard drive collection.

Ambient Occlusion dirt maps would be awesome...

The biggest problem here was making the brass rail around the edge of the table in Maya. Initially I wanted to use transparency maps to pierce it into a grille but that proved impossible so I boned up on creating deformers under Animation and pieced a fully 3d one together with all the punched openings in the metal. Lots of messing with little stubborn problems there but it all worked out in the end. Yesterday I pieced it together...today I figured out the metal railing and did some UV mapping in 3d Coat (the best UV mapper there is right now I think) and tomorrow I'll take all the pieces of it into 3d Coat for per pixel painting of color maps, normal maps and displacement maps, like the grooves on the legs of the table. Then I'll assemble all my maps in Maxwell to create the MXM files. I'm planning on really aging that railing; I hope I can make it look like really old brass..right now all the textures in the table are Blinn placeholders... BTW, anybody got a nice white marble with dark streaks in it, something high res like 2096 x 2096 or higher that they can share with me? Update; I've been wrestling with painting this grille railing all afternoon. IF YOU DON'T HAVE YOUR UV MAP LAID OUT RIGHT THEN YOU AIN'T GOING NOWHERE IN PER PIXEL PAINT. That's all I have to say about it. But I finally cracked down and made cuts on every opening in the grille...all 180 of them. Let's just say I'm developing a facility with handling my obj in the view port.. But the ugly work is done so let the fun begin...generating a whole series of color, normal and spec maps, to try to give the impression of fatigued brass with some worn gold on top of it...This will be fun. So I've put a thin unevenly mapped layer of dull gold over a substrate of some kind of corroded smooth metal, with a broad bump map to make an uneven relflection to break up the perfect finish and make it look like worn electroplate gilt trim. It's got a way to go yet

3dCoat 2.xxx was a crude beast. I respect you for that.

Ok I've got it now..right in front of my nose.. Aaaaand the new workd champeen for UV mapping...3d Coat! hahaha. what a struggle of stumbling around in the gullies though...

Thanks I'm using the Applink for Maya 3dCoat and it's excellent but there's a hell of a lot of buttons to push in it and a lot to know.. I've gotten a created asset from Maya to 3dcoat for Voxelization in the past, but now I want to transfer an asset as a topology for UV Mapping...and it's all trial and error for me...I'm looking for a smooth workflow here.

Also, it's in pieces...I'd like to bring them in from Maya as layers I can turn on or off and manipulate seperatly as I work on them but I'd like them all on the same setup in 3d Coat. I'm bringing them in from Maya so I don't necessarily have to import them to 3d Coat as .obj files if that is necessary.

PTex and C4d are a lot easier to work with than PTex and Houdini;

Nice, are those night guards or for contact sports?

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You know, it's pretty sad that if I write "rendering ptex in mantra" into Google, this is the first hit I get. I've got 5 videos in my collection that I've gleaned here and there on this rather important subject and THREE OF THEM DON'T HAVE SOUND AND ARE OF DEPLORABLE QUALITY. Of the other two one is only a tacked on segment of two or three minutes to a Houdini Master Class and the other is Peter Bomar where he works with texture maps to Houdini from 3d Coat BUT IT DOESN'T DEAL WITH PTEX. This is the kind of support that Houdini gives to PTex; http://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini11.0/shade/ptex Big help eh? Please, will someone make a proper comprehensive guide, written or video on how to implement PTEX between 3d Coat and Houdini??

yeah documentation is sparse and frankly few of the Kurv videos are very good. L J Bamforth's are the exception to that rule. His videos are outstanding. This should lay out the workflow for you on the Merge tool in 3d coat;

Turning off the Additive Drawing tool from the Depth Painting tool. I had no idea of the existence of this switch. I was really getting frustrated trying to deal with the seams being formed between painted areas. Falloff wasn't solving my problem. This does.. If you didn't know, now you do...

That's nice to know. Thanks a lot.

OK, I modeled a femur in Maya then took it over to 3d Coat and used Merge Tool to turn it into voxels and rework it at a higher level of refinement. All went well after a bit of buggering around to reteach myself this arcane skill. So then I finished working on the modeling with voxels level and did an Autopo For Per Pixel. What I got from this was a retopoed mesh in the Retopo UI, A UV map of my work in the UV UI, and in the Paint UI I have what appears to be the Voxel version of my original sculpt in it's Old Bone Sans Ambient Occlusion material. Apparently though I'm not sure. In the Layers menu I'm looking at four things; -Baked Occlusion (map) -Normal Map -Voxel (of my sculpt) That is the one selected and if I click on the eye next to it it disappears. -Layer 0 Now as you can see I'm texturing away but I'm a bit worried about where this is all going since I'm sailing off into a bit of mer incognita here. 1.When I'm finished texturing what next? How do I extract all this to a mesh with maps (8096x8096) that I can take over to Maya/Mental Ray for rendering? 2.When I do bake all this information out somehow or other how do I select the folder where I want these newly baked maps and .obj mesh to end up? Will I be able to get a displacement map out of this as well as a normal map? This is my first venture in painting directly onto the voxels and I like it a lot so far...here's hoping the entire episode doesn't end in disappointment. Also I've got one other question about texturing, which in my opinion is really the selling point of 3d coat. It's amazing and a real rival to Weta Mari; if you look at the smooth bulb of the ball that fits into the hip socket you'll see I wanted to make it smooth, but on the borders of each setup of the texture map to a new angle the overrun of my texturing brush creates an unpleasant seam or indentation that ruins the effect. I've got falloff on the brush over 50% but it's still doing this. Is there any solution so I can have seamless borders between texture patches?

Great stuff. Thanks a lot. You've got an attentive and appreciative audience over here..

Yeah I'm having problems with this myself. I'm trying smooth tool and fill tool cranked up to a depth of over 4280% and nothing doing...still bumpy... Wow, I just downloaded and installed the 3.5.18 beta and smooth and fill and carve tool are working 1000x better than the updated version I was running before...